In fact, today’s campuses mimic ideological boot camps. Tenured professors seek to indoctrinate young people in certain preconceived progressive political agendas. Environmental-studies classes are not very open to debating the “settled science” of man-caused, carbon-induced global warming – or the need for immediate and massive government intervention to address it. Grade-conscious and indebted students make the necessary ideological adjustments.

Few sociology courses celebrate the uniquely American assimilationist melting pot. Race, class, and gender agenda courses – along with thousands of “studies” courses – have been invented. A generation of politicized professors has made the strange argument that they alone have discovered all sorts of critical new disciplines of knowledge – apparently unknown for 2,500 years – to ensure that graduates would be better educated than ever before.

Universities have lost their commitment to the inductive method. Preconceived anti-Enlightenment theories are established as settled fact and part of career promotion. Evidence is made to fit these unquestioned assumptions.

Students now leave campus largely prepped by their professors to embrace a predictable menu: the glories of larger government, income redistribution, greater entitlements, radical environmentalism, abortion, multiculturalism, suspicion of traditional religion, and antipathy to the international role of the United States in the past and present.

Unfortunately, this costly indoctrination comes at the expense of what is increasingly less taught: traditional mastery of foreign languages, great works of literature, philosophy, history, mastery of grammar and composition, and the Socratic method.

Employers and the adult world no longer equate a bachelor’s degree with proof of a well-rounded education.

Careerism often drives campus politics. If poor, minority or first-generation college students could obtain the traditional tools of success – English and mathematical literacy, acquaintance with American history and protocols, oral- and written-language mastery – they would succeed as individuals without need for the college industry of collective victimology that assumes a permanent lack of parity.

Advertisement

Employers and the adult world no longer equate a bachelor’s degree with proof of a well-rounded education. Yet chastized universities usually oppose any objective measurement of their effectiveness. They certainly want federally insured student loans, but they do not want proof of their competency through national exit tests, which might help ensure that all graduates leave college able to compute, read, and write well. How odd that standardized tests are permissible to judge entering students but not to certify exiting ones.

#share#Colleges are schizophrenic in lots of other ways. They claim they are special institutions that should be free to form their own curricula, enjoy ancient rites such as faculty tenure, not worry much how much they charge students or treat part-time faculty, and establish radical new legal protocols that run contrary to the Constitution.

When colleges create “safe spaces” designated by race and gender, they butt up against U.S. law. Assuming the guilt rather than innocence of students accused of bad behavior does not stand up in court.

Most Americans who work in a mall or shop are not awarded lifelong guaranteed employment. Nor are our newspapers censored with “trigger warnings” in fear that readers might become hurt by depressing news stories.

Universities ask the public to subsidize these strange rituals by making endowments tax-exempt. The government extends federally guaranteed loans and ensures write-offs for charitable giving.

In the past, there was a clear bargain. The university said, “Leave us alone to do our business that we know best, and we promise to turn out the best-educated and most inductive generation of American youth.”

Universities are now breaking their word. Students, if they even graduate (about four in ten do not, even after six years), are not “universally” educated. Instead, they are the least prepared yet most politicized graduates in memory. Arrogance and ignorance are a bad combination.

#related#If the university cannot fulfill its original compact of broadly educating youth while keeping within bounds of American laws and protocols, then it will either have to change or slowly become irrelevant.

The market is already sensing a void – and thus opportunity. Online degree programs proliferate. Private vocational and trade schools sprout up around college campuses. Even Ivy League degrees have become mostly empty brand names, like Gucci or Versace, that convey status and open doors but hardly guarantee that graduates are knowledgeable or inductive thinkers.

All of these growing alternatives to borrowing a collective $1 trillion for university education reflect that it may not only be a bad deal, but a rigged one as well.

Victor Davis Hanson
—
NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.
@vdhanson

The news that FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe was fired hours before qualifying for retirement with full benefits somehow grew over the weekend into a false impression that the career FBI agent was stripped of his pension altogether.
[jwplayer GlHOavPa-wKJ9CRQU]
Members of the media remarked that McCabe ...
Read More

Representative Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) bucked his party on President Trump's firing of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, remarking that his dismissal may have been "justified."
“You know, his firing may be justified,” the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said on ABC’s This Week. ...
Read More

Labels multiply in supermarkets faster than salmonella at a convenience-store sushi bar. It’s important to keep up; we should all be well-informed eaters. But the onslaught of clean food, natural products, sustainably produced, gluten free, butterflies everywhere, and GMO-free sea salt are just too much. The ...
Read More

It can be hard to keep one’s wits about oneself during the Age of Trump. Our president is like the ringmaster of a circus, and the American people are his enthralled spectators. It seems as if we cannot get enough. Love him or hate him, he remains at the center of our public consciousness.
It is hard to ...
Read More

The “free college” movement, fueled to a large degree by Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential bid, is a response to concerns about increasing college-tuition rates, concomitant stagnation in state and federal grants, and a corresponding student-loan debt load that has ballooned to roughly $1.4 ...
Read More

The use of assassination raises two difficult sets of questions.
First: Is it effective? Can the elimination of an individual significantly change the course of history? Make the world a safer place? Save the lives of other human beings?
Second: Is it morally and legally justified? Is it ethically and ...
Read More

An unforced error from a Vatican communications office the other day drove me a little something like crazy. The nature of the unforced error is that it is wholly unnecessary and typically distracting. And so it was.
Days before, as the fifth anniversary of Pope Francis’s election as pope was approaching, a ...
Read More

Of all the abrupt comings and goings in this administration, the dismissal of Rex Tillerson is undoubtedly the most important — maybe one of the most important firings since Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War.
By dismissing MacArthur, Truman drew a firm line between military and ...
Read More